Keanu Reeves in The Matrix, which introduced the world to the thought we could be living in a simulation

Now it has been claimed that a pair of unnamed Silicon Valley billionaires are so convinced we're living in a real-life Matrix that they are funding research aimed at discovering ways of escaping it.

"Many people in Silicon Valley have become obsessed with the simulation hypothesis, the argument that what we experience as reality is in fact fabricated in a computer,” wrote Tad Friend in The New Yorker.

“Two tech billionaires have gone so far as to secretly engage scientists to work on breaking us out of the simulation.”

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The claim was made in an article about Sam Altman, an entrepreneur who runs a firm called Y Combinator which funds tech start-ups.

Altman claimed that humans and machines would soon "merge" into one and this is the "best scenario" we can hope for, because if we don't join forces with an advanced artificial intelligence (AI) it could end up killing us all.

He said: "Any version without a merge will have conflict: we enslave the A.I. or it enslaves us.

"The full-on-crazy version of the merge is we get our brains uploaded into the cloud."

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Its researchers neglected to say whether there was a way out of our sticky simulated situation.

“Many scientists, philosophers, and business leaders believe that there is a 20-50% probability that humans are already living in a computer-simulated virtual world,” it wrote last week, according to Business Insider.

“In April 2016, researchers gathered at the American Museum of Natural History to debate this notion.

“The argument is that we are already approaching photorealistic 3D simulations that millions of people can simultaneously participate in.

“It is conceivable that with advancements in artificial intelligence, virtual reality, and computing power, members of future civilisations could have decided to run a simulation of their ancestors.

“Unless we are now living in a simulation, our descendants will almost certainly never run an ancestor-simulation.”

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